


take a moment to think of just (flexibility, love, and trust)

by improbablyamartian



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: an exploration into pidge's head, pre-canon one-shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:48:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26851717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/improbablyamartian/pseuds/improbablyamartian
Summary: (“Pidge!” Matt says, dodging her half-hearted swing at the hated nickname. “Now, when I become an astronaut, you can map out my travels in the stars!” He traces an imaginary flight path through the stars so carefully placed on her ceiling, climbing up on her bed so he can touch them.“But I only have a teensy-weensie part of the sky on my ceiling,” she points out, ruining his ten-year-old logic.Matt, never the kid to be intimidated by such things, replies, “Then we’ll add them in!”“We can’t buy that many stars! Besides, there isn’t space on my ceiling!” she makes a wide gesture, indicating the nonexistent empty areas on her ceiling.“Can too!”“Can not!”)an exploration into pidge's head during, before, and after the kerberos mission and subsequent 'crash'.
Relationships: Colleen Holt & Pidge | Katie Holt, Colleen Holt/Sam Holt, Matt Holt & Pidge | Katie Holt, Matt Holt & Sam Holt, Matt Holt & Sam Holt & Pidge | Katie Holt
Kudos: 3





	take a moment to think of just (flexibility, love, and trust)

It’s a school night, and it’s _way_ too late, but Katie can’t fall asleep. Thoughts bounce around her brain, never stilling. She lays on her back and blows a strand of hair out of her face, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to her ceiling.

She can still remember the day that she, Dad, and Matt put them up. They had planned out each constellation with extreme precision, she and Matt working with the kind of dedication only small children could have, mapping out the night sky as it looked on Katie’s birthday.

Katie thinks now of Matt and Dad and Shiro on the space mission they’d always dreamed of. By now, they’re halfway there, navigating through the stars to Kerberos. The thought causes a knot to form in her stomach, and she rolls over, groaning into her pillow.

_(“Pidge!” Matt says, dodging her half-hearted swing at the hated nickname. “Now, when I become an astronaut, you can map out my travels in the stars!” He traces an imaginary flight path through the stars so carefully placed on her ceiling, climbing up on her bed so he can touch them._

_“But I only have a teensy-weensie part of the sky on my ceiling,” she points out, ruining his ten-year-old logic._

_Matt, never the kid to be intimidated by such things, replies, “Then we’ll add them in!”_

_“We can’t buy that many stars! Besides, there isn’t space on my ceiling!” she makes a wide gesture, indicating the nonexistent empty areas on her ceiling._

_“Can too!”_

_“Can not!”_ )

(They couldn’t have copied the 3 dimensions of space on her two-dimensional ceiling, anyways.)

She breathes in, breathes out, (the pillow makes it hard to breathe, but she can’t bring herself to care) and has to stifle a sob.

“3.1415...92...65359…” she whispers the digits into her pillow. (The way Matt had taught her) “3.14159...265…” She groans again, louder, pushes herself up, and flops out of bed onto the floor. This isn’t the first time the absence of Matt and Dad has kept her up, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still exhausting, both emotionally and physically.

She lays there, softly shaking, tears tracing paths down her cheeks, then half crawls to the foot of her bed and hauls herself up by the bedframe. She stands there for a moment, considering her bed.

(Ten-year-old Matt, standing on his tiptoes, tracing the stars. Eighteen-year-old Matt, beaming, placing his glasses softly onto her nose)

( _“Pidge!”_ )

Katie shakes her head and spins around to face her mirror. The light from her lamp reflects strangely on her face, so she reaches over and switches on the light. She examines herself, all brightly lit.

Golden Holt eyes. (Round glasses that Matt liked because they looked like Harry Potter’s.)

Honey-blonde Holt hair. (Shorn short, framing a face so similar to her own.)

Eyebrows. Same honey-blonde. (Her mother’s eyebrows, creeping higher and higher as Dad explained that he had been chosen for the Kerberos Mission)

( _“What about Katie, Sam? What about us?”_ )

She pushes her own eyebrows up, tracing the lines they created with her eyes, remembers similar creases in other faces.

She sees all these little details, all these things that make her _her_ , but also make her so similar to the family so far away. Her mind, always moving, calculating, imagining, starts to draw more and more connections. The shape of her jaw. (Mom) The line of her cheekbones. (Dad) Those annoying little freckles that Tim Harrison had teased her about relentlessly in the third grade. (Matt. _Matt_.)

( _“How was school today, Pidge?”_

_“What do you mean?”_

_“I dunno,” Matt stands up from where he was leaning against the doorframe to her room. “You sure it wasn’t… Quieter? Calmer?”_

_“What did you do, Matt?” She watches him, trying to look angry and doing a poor job of it._

_“I just gave a little punk what he deserved.”_

_“I thought that Tim was sick with the flu,” she says slowly, starting to understand._

_“Naw, he was sick of me threatening him with the Rover 2000.” He looks so, so smug._

_Katie laughs and laughs and laughs - at his face, at the robot’s stupid name - and Matt watches her proudly._

_He was always watching out for her._ )

She and Matt have been inseparable for as long as she can remember. Her mom calls them twins separated by time. Her dad just laughs at their countless exploits and calls them his little mad scientists.

( _“If anyone asks, it was Matt who blew up the lawnmower.”_

 _“Oka- Wait. DAD!”_ )

(Sam is quite the mad scientist, too.)

They wouldn’t complain - they got it from him, anyways, and enjoyed the title. When they were 5 and 8, they built a LEGO Death Star from scratch. They added working laser beams, of course, constructed from things they had discovered lying around in their dad’s workshop, and terrorized Bae-Bae for over a week before their mother stepped in. When they were 6 and 9, they added a working turbo button onto Sam’s hoverbike. (Sam found this out after accidentally pushing it and nearly crashing into several trees at top speed.) The next week, they built a satellite on the roof to communicate with aliens. Their dad always ended up laughing, and their mother always smiled at their synchronicity, their perfect (but rowdy) collaboration. 

Now, Katie feels their absence more than ever. It has been two months since the shuttle carrying her father and brother and Shiro had taken off. She missed Matt from the moment he had pulled away from their hug good-bye. She looks down at the dresser, at the round glasses sitting there innocently, and tears up again.

( _“Hey, Pidge?”_

_“Yeah?” she replies, looking up at the dark sky, dotted with stars. The two of them were sitting on the garage roof, something they weren’t supposed to do but were allowed this one time because of that-thing-that-must-not-be-named._

_“While I’m… gone, I want you to hold onto these for me, okay? Wear them and think of me sometimes.” His voice catches as he speaks and she can hear that he is close to crying. “Just, you know, remember that I’m okay and I’m off having cool space adventures. Don’t miss me too much, okay, Pidgeon?”_

_She takes a moment to find Draco, the Dragon, to breathe, before she responds, her eyes tracing the familiar pattern of stars. “Okay... but not now. I’ll take them when you’re actually leaving. I won’t wear them until you’re climbing into a space shuttle blasting off towards Kerberos.” She turns towards her brother, gently taking the glasses from his outstretched hands and placing them back on his face._ )

Katie picks up the round frames and holds them to the light for a second, just remembering. Then, slowly, hesitantly, she slips them on. She hasn’t worn them since the launch, and now, feeling the glasses’ cool weight on her face, the tears come for real. Peering at herself in the mirror through her tears, she gasps. The face looking back at her, blurred as it is, looks so much like Matt that her heart breaks just a little more.

She stumbles back, covering her mouth, and slumps against the foot of her bed, sobbing harder and harder, trying her best to stay quiet, to not disturb the little family left in the house. She cries for her brother, (twin-not-twin-gone-but-here) and for her father (dad-miss-you-too-far-away). For a moment, her tears turn angry as she thinks about the people who had sent them away, who tore their family in half and left a gaping distance between the two parts.

( _“Your brother and father are brave men, Katie. You should be very proud of them,” Iverson’s voice is gruff like always, but there seems to be a hint of disappointment in it today._

_Of course, she’s proud; she just misses them so much. Matt is her other half. Sam is half of her parental unit. They're her home - she doesn’t like having to give them up for so long. She constantly has to stop herself from thinking about all the things that could go wrong._

_“Yes, sir.”_ )

She lays there, on the carpeted floor, her sobbing slowly calming until she finally stops, exhausted. She pulls herself up and drops into her bed, quickly falling into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

* * *

Katie trudges through the next few weeks slowly and painfully. She’s scared for her family, happy and proud and excited, yes, but her gut won’t stop telling her something is wrong, something will go wrong. Some days, she goes to school; other times, worst case scenarios run through her head on repeat and she can hardly speak, let alone move, and stays home, just sitting there and staring into space while her mother runs her fingers through her hair. 

It isn’t long until three months have passed. _Dad and Matt and Shiro have probably made it to Kerberos,_ she realizes one day. She hasn’t missed a day of school in several weeks, and isn’t missing her dad and Matt so sharply anymore. Absently, she wonders why the Garrison haven’t alerted them to their arrival yet.

Two days later, she learns why. It’s been an unexpectedly bad day. She is hit by a wave of grief and misses Dad and Matt _so much-_ This is why Katie is curled up with a fluffy blanket on the Holt’s couch, trying to forget the rest of the world exists and lose herself in some stupid sitcom that’s playing when the Garrison officer arrives.

“...crash? And I’m supposed to believe that it was due to pilot error? Are you kidding me? If you’re going to feed me a load of crap, at least make it believable. Shiro is the best pilot of his generation. He’s never even crashed in a simulator. I demand to know what has happened to my husband and son.”

_…what?_

_Crash? They… crashed?_

Suddenly, Katie feels her world start to crumble. She can’t make a sound, but inside her head is a cacophony of sounds; Matt’s excited “Pidge!”, her dad’s fond praises, the sound of the shuttle taking off an exp ~~lo~~ ~~sion _Matt and Sam’s screams_ ~~ _~~-~~_ It all loops over and over again in her brain. She gasps for air, but somehow, despite being surrounded by it, cannot seem to take any in. For months, despite her worries, she had reassured herself that Shiro was an amazing pilot, that her dad himself had checked over their shuttle, that Matt and her dad could fix any mechanical problem that might arise on their flight.

But now-

_Now-_

Matt and Dad and Shiro were supposed to go to Kerberos, make awesome scientific discoveries, and return home heroes. But they weren’t coming home. They hadn’t even had the chance to do anything, if what the Garrison representative is now saying is true. The worst case scenario she had finally started to convince herself wouldn't come to pass had happened. How can this happen? How can the best space team Earth could put together just… crash and die? It isn’t possible. Something else has happened. Matt and Dad are okay. She shoves every other possibility away, wipes away the tears she suddenly realizes have been silently gushing down her face, and makes a plan.

~~_They can’t be dead they can’t die she couldn’t live without them not them never them-_ ~~

For the next month, Katie plots. She breaks into the Garrison, and manages to get into the system long enough to confirm her suspicions from the last shuttle log. They catch her, but she doesn’t let that stop her. She cuts her hair, and sees in the mirror for the first time how similar she and Matt really are- her mom was right; they could be twins. She creates a new identity for herself; Garrison recruit Pidge Gunderson, male. Taking the name Pidge feels right; the only identity that could possibly fit for a mission such as hers. Slipping on her brother’s glasses, she remembers that night not too long ago. This time, instead of making her sad, the frames reassure her and remind her of her mission. Her mom helps her pack and after saying goodbye, she leaves the house the next morning, unaware that this is the last time for a long time she will see her mother.

Pidge arrives at the Garrison and immediately starts to put her plan into action. She builds a satellite, the way her dad taught her, aimed at the stars. and over the course of what seems like both an eternity and no time at all, fine-tunes it. She tests it every night on the roof of the Garrison dorms, hoping against all hope that her hypothesis is correct.

It seems like forever before she starts picking up the alien radio chatter, but she doesn’t have to wait long after that. Just under a year after Matt, Dad, and Shiro had “crashed”, Pidge rides into the stars on a lion-shaped alien warship. Her teammates and Shiro are by her side and a renewed hope is in her heart, strengthening her resolve.

Whatever it takes, she’ll bring them home. Nothing can stand in the way of a Holt fighting to get her family back.

**Author's Note:**

> this was a loooong process... i'm glad to be done and posted!  
> thanks as always to my wonderful, amazing, incredible beta supernaturalist1234! thank you, thank you, thank you!  
> edit 2/20/2021: tweaked a couple of things to make it read a little more smoothly  
> comments and kudos keep me motivated, so maybe i'll get to writing the mysterious new fic i'm planning out...


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